You know the story. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy loses girl. Girl runs away. Girl is shot dead by a mysterious cowboy. Girl wakes up in a new house, with a new life, and a new boy. Wait, what?
Love Everlasting Vol. 1
Elsa Charretier (artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Tom King (writer)
Image Comics
February 7, 2023
In Love Everlasting, you only think we know the story. Seventy-six years after the publication of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Young Romance #1, romance comics and their sororities of crying, well-coiffed beauties have pillaged by pop artists, parodied on variant covers, and turned into kitschy knick-knacks. Even if you’ve never picked up a yellowed copy of Secret Hearts or Girls’ Romances from a Comic-Con dollar bin, you know that whatever tragic misunderstandings or petty jealousies come between a girl and her man (and it is always a man), the comic will resolve them with a romantic clinch by page 6. And on page 12. And page 18. And, and, and….
Love Everlasting, written by Tom King and gorgeously illustrated by Elsa Charretier, slips a vial of poison into that fizzy pink concoction. An explosive deconstruction of the midcentury romance comic, the series was originally posted online via the creative team’s Substack, with the first five issues (now collected in this trade paperback) published in physical form by Image Comics.
The central conceit is part Groundhog Day, part My Bloody Valentine. (“My Bloody Groundhog Day?”) Joan Peterson is a 1950s secretary secretly pining after her boss. Joan is also a 19th century chambermaid entangled with the lord of the manor, and a torch singer under the spell of a shell-shocked soldier in World War I. Trapped in a vicious loop of death and desire, Joan falls in love, again and again, only to wake up in a new time, with a new history and a new beau. If she tries to run and escape her fate, a mysterious cowboy hunts her down with the grim determination of a Terminator, delivering the message “Love is Everlasting” before he puts a bullet in her body or her brain. And the cycle starts all over again.
The series is a showcase for Charretier’s artistic talents; her pen waltzes effortlessly from story to story, creating new worlds for Joan every issue. No setting or subgenre is off-limits, and sharp-eyed readers should pause to appreciate the decades of fashions on display – whether she’s romancing her boss in a Christian Dior-inspired cocktail dress or disco dancing in leopard-print spandex, our embattled heroine always looks fabulous. (Indeed, it’s a shame that Joan’s blood-splattered wedding dress only appears on the trade paperback cover. I want to read that story!) Matt Hollingsworth’s atmospheric colors know how to set a mood, with dreamy, romantic pinks turning to nightmarish reds. They heighten the deliberate artificiality of these worlds, creating a creamy but oppressive effect worthy of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor tearjerkers.
But speaking of color, I have to talk about Tom King’s purple-hued prose. (Literally, the caption box is purple: “I crooned into the darkness…It seemed in some ways like the world was ending, as if soon there would be Nothing Left but Love!”) It’s impossible to imagine anyone writing narration like this without at least a small laugh, true. But what impresses me about King’s writing in Love Everlasting is that he respects the romance comic even as he subverts it. King understands the genre’s rusty old mechanics – issue #5 presents a dark parody of the “Dating Do’s and Don’ts” columns that popped up in these books like mushrooms – without overdoing the kitsch factor or slipping into easy, snide mockery.
Instead, King and Charretier seem more interested in exploring (and exploding) the tension inherent in the midcentury romance comic. In their heyday, these were the only comics consistently marketed to girls and young women – but even as they took their wants and desires seriously, the vast majority presented heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the one and only path to a woman’s happiness. As Joan would say, “What the fuck?!” Love is everlasting – but it’s also a terrible trap, one that seeks to punish Joan, over and over again, for her insubordinate need for personal freedom.
Even as Charretier and King play with the romance comic formula – there is even a clever switcheroo in issue #3, “Too Late for Love!” – there is a question of just how far they can twist it until it snaps. By the end of the fifth issue, Joan and the mysterious cowboy both show signs of exhaustion at their cat and mouse game, and though we learn who is responsible for casting Joan into paramour purgatory, the series is far from over. Beautifully presented, swooningly dark, and tinged with paranoia, Love Everlasting is a bittersweet little bonbon.
